1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to student assessment systems and methods, and, more particularly, to systems and methods for designing and creating such assessments.
2. Description of Related Art
Instruments created to examine a student's knowledge of a particular discipline typically include a series of questions to be answered or problems to be solved. Tests have evolved from individually authored, unitarily presented documents into standardized, multiauthor documents delivered over wide geographic ranges and on which multivariate statistics can be amassed. As the importance of test results has increased, for myriad educational and political reasons, so has the field of test creation experienced a concomitant drive towards more sophisticated scientific platforms, necessitating increased levels of automation in every element of the process.
With the “No Child Left Behind” initiative, school districts are increasingly focusing on individual students' performance on a specific subset of content standards measure on an accountability test. The consequences are high if adequate yearly progress is not demonstrated. However, adequate yearly progress is defined on total test performance, not performance on individual content standards.
Educators do not want assessment content to narrow the curriculum. Teachers want to teach more than what is tested in the accountability arena. Content standards tend to be hierarchical; students often need to learn the foundational skills before moving on to more complex skills. Other standards are recursive and cumulative, but it may be that only the more complex skills are being monitored. It would be beneficial to track what is taught and what is learned on the path to proficiency.
Traditional multiple-choice test items are developed to have one correct answer and three or four incorrect answers that are equally attractive to the test taker who does not know the correct answer. These wrong answers usually reflect wrong answers that students would make if they were asked to answer the question without seeing the incorrect answers. However, these wrong answers must be equally viable and therefore equally attractive wrong answers. Consequently, these wrong answers often reflect the same level of breakdown in student understanding. For example, in the content area of reading, if the question asks what the main idea of the passage is, the wrong answers are likely to each be an important detail or aspect of the passage.
When creating an item, the incorrect options, or distractors, have previously been less important in writing and editing an item than the correct answer has been. Distractors are generally structured to reflect typical student errors, but, in general, information about those errors and what they reveal about student cognition has not been collected and analyzed. This is probably due to the focus on measuring student achievement as opposed to indicating the limitations of student understanding.
It is also typical that, in a traditional multiple-choice test question, each of the distractors would be at one level of understanding depending upon the difficulty target of the question.